Malcom X
...Nebraska, to Earl Little and Louise Helen (née Norton). He lived briefly at 3448 Pinkney Street in the North Omaha neighborhood. His father was an outspoken Baptist lay speaker and supporter of Marcus Garvey, as well as a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.[3] Three of Earl Little's brothers died violently at the hands of white men, and one of his uncles had been lynched.[4]
Earl Little had three children (Ella, Mary, and Earl, Jr.) by a previous marriage before he married Malcolm's mother. From his second marriage he had seven children, of whom Malcolm was the fourth. Earl and Louise Little's children's names were, in order, Wilfred, Hilda, Philbert, Malcolm, Reginald, Wesley, and Yvonne. Louise had her youngest son, Robert Little, several years after her husband's death by an unnamed relationship.
Louise Little was born in Grenada, and Malcolm said she looked like a white woman. Her father was a white man of whom Malcolm knew nothing except what he described as his mother's shame. Malcolm got his light complexion from him. Initially he felt it was a status symbol to be light-skinned, but later he would say that he “hated every drop of that white rapist's blood that is in me.” As Malcolm was the lightest child in the family, he felt that his father favored him; however, his mother treated him harshly for the same reason.[5] One of his nicknames, "Red," derived from the reddish tinge of his hair. He was described as having, at birth, "ash-blonde hair ... tinged with cinnamon," and at four, "reddish-blonde hair." His hair darkened as he aged but also resembled the hair of his paternal grandmother, whose hair "turned reddish in the summer sun."[6]
According to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, his mother had been threatened by Ku Klux Klansmen while she was pregnant with him in December 1924. His mother recalled the Klansmen warned the family...
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